I made a component which I will release this summer. Its GPL and has plugins. So far I've made my plugins install as normal components. Now I'm wondering how much work it will be to make an installer like the one used in Community Builder and JCE. By the looks of it the code is't all copyrighted and scripted for particular components.

Last edited by carsten888 on Sun Jul 20, 2008 11:41 am, edited 2 times in total.

I would like to discuss the pro's and con's of having plugins in a component-specific-installer as opposed to having plugins install as components.

pro plugin-installer:
- no joomla-version-specific plugins needed. This might make it easyer for 3rd-party developers to make plugins.
con plugin-installer:
- more code. why include an installer when there is already a perfectly good installer in the Joomla core?
- there does not seem to be a joomla-component-specific-plugin-framework to manage and install plugins. So that needs to be coded (version-specific) from com_installer. (which is more work for me).
pro component-installer:
- 3rd-party developers might find it easyer developing plugins as components, if they are familiar with making components.

con component-installer:
- plugins need to be joomla-version-specific (1.0.x or 1.5.x)
- looks slightly less professional (when making a menu-item-link to a component, there's all them plugins in the list.)

please give me some feedback on this. I would love to get some replies from the core-team.